The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 46 of 125
Shamanic flight between three worlds
Only after this experience of death and resurrection were they apprenticed to an established shaman. The teaching they received was substantially the same over a vast geographical area—that they were not their physical body, but were capable of sidestepping time and space. For this world was not the only one. There were two adjacent worlds: a world beneath us, which was the underworld; and a world above us, which was the heaven realm. What the sorcerer’s apprentice learned from his or her mentor was how to navigate these three worlds: the “archaic techniques of ecstasy,” which compose the central practice of shamanism, and which Eliade refers to as magical flight. The essential schema is always to be seen, even after the numerous influences to which it has been subjected; there are three great cosmic regions, which can be successively traversed because they are linked together by a central axis. This axis, of course, passes through an “opening,” a “hole”; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys.4 This was the point at which Eliade’s and the Wassons’ version of archaic religion diverged sharply. Angrily, Eliade repudiated any suggestion that psychoactive plants could have fueled magical flight—dismissing such substances as “narcotics,” which hardly indicates familiarity with the subject. Vigils, trance-dancing, vision quests, these Eliade could accept—but reliance on psychoactive plants was a sure sign the shaman belonged to an increasingly degenerate tradition.